In Another Life
by StarlightAsteria
Summary: You must know - Elizabeth, you must know - in another life I would have asked for your hand. Elizabeth/Fitzwilliam Darcy AU.
She kneels in front of him, daring, for the first - _and only,_ her mind whispers to her treacherously - time, in the short time they have come to know each other within the confines of this dreary cell, to take his larger hands and cradle them within her own. He inhales sharply at the contact, and his eyes fly to hers, despair and agony warring in his expression.

"Swear your loyalty, pledge your allegiance to him, and be a prisoner no more. _Please._ " Her voice breaks, and his fingers tighten over hers. "Take this vow, and _live!_ " She exhorts him, but she knows she is asking much of him. Perhaps too much. He was their enemy, captured after a battle beyond the southern mountains, a battle which he lost. He was hauled into the citadel in chains of gold, a mockery of his rank, the kind of ill-suited jest that had had the Mad King's steward in their part of the country, a man possessed of a mind as narrow as his waistline was large, a self-styled Lord Collins, in wheezing fits of laughter.

"I cannot." He chokes on the words, shaking his head, and he is a man _desperate._ "Would that I could -" he pulls one hand free of hers and lifts it gently, brushing a strand of long dark hair away from her cheek and behind the shell of her right ear with the gentlest of touches. "But I cannot." Her vision of him, of this extraordinary, noble man, is blurred by tears she doesn't realise are falling down the soft skin of her cheeks until he wipes them away with the pad of his thumb. She shudders at the contact, and wants to close her eyes, to glory in the sensation of his touch, but she doesn't because she doesn't want to lose the sight of him for even a single moment.

"I cannot break the vows I have taken, forsake the loyalty I have sworn." He continues softly, and her heart is at once both awed and broken by his sense of honour. "I cannot abandon the family I must love, the people I must protect, and the soldiers I must lead." He takes a deep breath. "Better a man condemned to die than to live a traitor."

He says it with such anguished calm that she knows he truly believes it. It is his deepest conviction, she realises. This, then, is Fitzwilliam Darcy, honourable even to his own death, and she is falling for him all over again.

"I am sorry," she says, suddenly ashamed of herself, ashamed that she would ask him to betray his sense of self, even to live, even to choose her over everything else. She knows he would not be able to cope, knowing himself to be a traitor, and so she cannot ask it of him. She will never ask it of him.

But he smiles that sad little half-smile, the corner of his lips tugging at the dimple in his left cheek in such a way that makes her heart melt. "So am I, my lady," he replies, voice husky with affection and despair. He lifts both her hands to his lips, kissing them softly, eyes molten and tender. When he continues, his voice is no less assured, but it carries the slightest note of frantic need. "You must know - _Elizabeth,_ you must know -" his voice is a caress, all of a sudden, "in another life, I would have asked for your hand."

Her response is to throw herself into his arms. "I would have given it to you." She's too numb to cry, the harsh, horrid reality of their situation burning itself icily into her soul. His arms tighten reflexively around her body and she burrows her face into his neck, torso pressed against torso, the pounding of their hearts reverberating, trembling in their bones.

"I would have given you everything."

She laughs and cries at his words, and he tightens his hold on her. "I will never ask you to give up your honour for me - I see that now, and I only admire you all the more for it. Can you forgive me?"

His answering smile is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. "There is nothing to forgive, my lady."

She's quiet when he slips a ring off the fifth finger of his right hand and presses it into her palm. "Will you take this, to remember me?" He murmurs, and her fingers curl around the twist of gold and diamonds and rubies. "If you are ever in Mornhaven," he continues, "this will protect you."

"Thank you," she replies, silently wondering exactly how much power he wields (He's never precisely answered her question, but she can put the clues together. His regal bearing, her brother-in-law Charles's gobsmacked and guilty expression when he was first thrown to the floor of the court at Lord Collins' feet, his oblique references to his people, the oaths he has sworn that he seems to consider sacred - everything points to one thing, and one thing only. He's so much more than an enemy General.

He's a _King._

He's the King of Mornhaven, holding his court at Pemberley.)

The heavy oaken door of their cell high in one of the towers of the citadel opens with a screeching creak of rusted hinges. She sees him pale and then clench his jaw at whoever their visitor is. As he draws himself up to his considerable height, she watches as he removes from his face any kind of emotion, but she knows, in the bite of his words and in the way he holds his hands together behind his back, knotting his fingers where only she can see them, she knows he's angry. _Furious._

"Charles? What are you doing here?"

Her brother-in-law, dressed in all the gaudy peacock finery of the Mad King's court, fidgets as he speaks. "The Mad King has decided that, enemy general that you are, you are to be hanged, in your armour, on your horse."

"Hang me - I... _Charles..._ " Fitzwilliam Darcy actually steps back, terror flashing like lightning across his face. "I am a man of the sword, at least let me die by the sword! Behead me with a blunt, rusty axe, use me as target practice and prick me full of arrows, butterfly my thorax and tear out my beating heart, burn me alive if you really must, but do not hang me!"

She's trembling, slack-jawed at the violence of his speech, mind reeling at the agony of the images he paints. And so is the man she loves, trembling with repressed fear and anger and adrenaline, and there's something in Charles's expression that leads her to believe that he knew of his fear of hanging, and yet has come to tell - his erstwhile ruler, and _friend,_ if Fitzwilliam's words and actions are any indication. She swallows the sudden igniting of fury in her blood. Does he not realise how cruel he is being? Or does he not care?

"I'm sorry, Lord Darcy," Charles replies, somewhat stiffly. "I am merely following orders."

"Orders indeed!" He bites back, scornful, dark eyes flashing. "I would expect no less from a traitor who has forsworn all bonds of blood and kinship!" He growls, and she understands just how hurt he is by this, and she somehow wishes Charles had never caught sight of the beautiful blonde angel that is her sister at court and agreed to the Mad King's terms so that he might have his life to woo Jane with. "You, you, traitor, friend, _brother of mine, you_ are my bane, my executioner!" He is incandescent with rage and despair and incomprehension.

"Leave!" She flings at Charles, and mercifully, he obeys her.

When she turns around, her King, her _love,_ is sitting on his bunk, a narrow, rickety wooden frame with a straw mattress that is as unyielding as steel, staring blankly at his hands resting in his lap. He looks up at her then, and she's struck by how raw his expression is. "His friendship obviously meant more to him than it did to me," he whispers, like a young child experiencing the bitterness of grief for the first time.

"Oh, Fitzwilliam," she sighs, and she goes to him, curling herself around him, seeking to offer him whatever comfort she can. She brushes her fingers through his dark, silky hair, again and again and again. He sobs silently into her neck, his grip around her waist almost painful.

He sobs as though the world is ending.

When she stirs from sleep, shafts of the pale dawn winter sun lighting the cell in beams of light, it is to Fitzwilliam's fingers gently combing through her hair, his voice soft in her ears. "It is time, I fear, my lady."

She burrows more deeply into his embrace, palm reassuringly seeking out the beating of his heart, strong under her fingertips as she traces patterns on his bare chest, before the misery in his words suddenly wakes her up completely.

"No! Not yet, Fitzwilliam. _No_!"

"We have no choice, my love," he replies tenderly, gently prying her fingers (fingers, arms, her entire body, her entire soul desperate to cling on to him for just one moment more) away from, as he rises to clothe himself.

"I wish - " she has so many things to say. _I love you. I lovelovelovelovelove -_ she can never say it enough. _I want to make you laugh. I want to make you happy. I want you to_ live. And now she has no time.

"My lady," he kneels at her feet, uncaring of the dirty straw on the flagstones. "My lady, though this imprisonment leads me to my death, I cannot regret it, for it led me to you. And you have been - you are worth _everything_." He strokes her cheek and she leans into the contact, trying to memorise the sensation, as his cloak pools around her waist, the sudden cold giving her goosebumps. "And though our time has been short -" only a week, she thinks, only a week for her life to be irrevocably changed "-being with you, beloved," he traces her bottom lip with his thumb, and she smiles despite her misery, "I have never been as happy; my lady, my beloved, my Elizabeth."

And then she kisses him, desperately. His response is no less fierce; he tangles one hand into her hair, the other curves around her hip. His fervour is such that he almost pulls her from the bed into his lap.

"I love you," she gasps as she breaks the kiss to breathe. "I love you. I love you and I'm yours." She would rather spend a single moment with him than a lifetime as the trophy-wife of Lord Collins, and if she is to be imprisoned for the rest of her existence in this tower of this godforsaken citadel for having such an opinion, then so be it.

"Smile for me," he says as they hear the guards outside marching down the corridor, drawing ever closer. He brushes her cheeks with his thumbs, the tips of his other fingers cradling her face. "I would see your smile as I go."

She smiles tremulously. "Only for you."

He kisses her again, chastely, wary of the guards rattling the keys in the lock on the other side of the door. He wraps his cloak around her, because he'll be damned if the guards catch a glimpse of the woman he calls wife in his heart, the woman he wishes with every fibre of his being he could have proclaimed as his wife to the whole world, in such a disheveled state. "I love you."

She smiles at him, and his touch lingers on her shoulders, on the curve of her neck, admiring the silky texture of her hair, the softness of her skin. He doesn't want to exist in a place where he isn't able to see her, to touch her. God help him, he doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to leave her. But neither will he swear fealty to the Mad King or his toady Collins.

The door opens and the guards enter to fit Fitzwilliam with the heavy iron manacles.

He doesn't want to turn his back on her, he wants to drink in the sight of her for as long as he possibly can, but as the guards tug on the manacles, he knows they're out of time.

Elizabeth knows this too, and just as he's about to walk slowly, painfully, through the door of the cell, never to see or hear or touch her again, the words wrench themselves from her throat in a desperate, despairing rush. "Fitzwilliam!"

He turns his head to look back at her, and god, this is _agony,_ there is no hell in existence more painful than this.

"In my entire life," she says, "I have never met a better man, nor one so undeserving of his fate." He wraps the her words and the sound of her voice around him, a protective wall around his heart and soul, that will help him as he goes to his execution. His mind insidiously combines her desperate calling of his name with the more pleasure-filled ways she'd murmured and panted and sobbed his name during the night, and he thanks her softly, and then his gaze is torn from hers as the guards manhandle him from the cell.

He will replay every single memory he has of her until his dying breath. His last thought, his last image, his last breath, everything - it will all be of her.

 _Elizabeth. My beloved._


End file.
